There is a point at which a trend becomes a state. We are culturally reliving the 1990s. Or at least there is a desire to pull the 1990s through time into the mid-2020s. I can understand why.

The current social and cultural era is – and I believe this is the correct social science term – a s**tshow.

So we want something else – specifically a mythical place where people hung around cafes without computers, read books on public transport, where people could afford rent in lively cities, where the T-shirts were larger, meals were cheaper, essential messages were communicated via answering machines or simply transmitted by calling around to friends’ flats where they lived independently, stopping off to return their Pulp Fiction rental back to the video shop. This is the idealised 1990s, specifically the idealised early-to-mid-1990s.

For people born in the 21st century, it is also a state of anemoia, a feeling of longing for a past that you didn’t experience. It’s also a cycle. In the 1990s, the 1960s were culturally revived. It makes sense that in the 2020s, the 1990s would come back. Call it a Saturnian return, but the 1990s are now so omnipresent in our culture that it feels we are living in parallel time of reality (now), and desire (then).

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